How long do you want to live?

[Any1]

Thanks for the informative post.

I completely agree that death is a necessary part of being a "living" organism, just as much as consumtion and reproduction.

One question, you don't think stem cells (or some derivative) can be used to slow down (by at least 50%) degenerative diseases, Within the next 10 years or so?

Stem cells = overhyped, overestimated and overrated.

And thats coming from someone who worked in mesenchymal stem cell isolation, adult stem cell culture and redifferentiation and applied stem cell science, namely tissue  engineering  :wacko:

If there was one lesson to be learned from the human genome project's major surprise then it's: many things are WAY more complicated than people think. So there's only 30.000 actual ORFs in the human genome? (One open reading frame very roughly translates to one gene) Not the previously estimated 100.000? What does it say about the 99% of our DNA that contain no ORFs? Really just evolutionary junk? Evolution does not work like that.

Mankind is *generations* away from understanding every detail of how those 30.000 genes are regulated by themselves and those other 99% of our genome. Knowing the genes is like having the part list for your new car. A list of the parts will not allow you to assemble it...  ;)

Once we have some database (and a computer thats able to run it) that models how each of the 30.000 is expressed, when, where and in what amount, and how each of the 30.000 resulting proteins (actually, more as some genes code for more than 1...) modulates the *other* 29.999 we can begin to think about changing the general nature of the Universe  :rolleyes:

Mortality is an integral and unchangeble part of being multicellular. Immortality and being a multicellular organism don't mix. Period. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have BUILT us to be mortal, there would have been no evolution without us being mortal. We won't simply negate millions of years of evolution by some sloppily applied patches. God - if one believes in one - is most definitely no Blizzard programmer.  B)

And one thing that I've come to take for granted: don't trust *any* scientist who promises some kind of specific applicable result "within 10 or 20 years".  :D

Armin
Ph. D in molecular cell biology
former cancer researcher
former tissue engineer
producer of cytokines
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